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Spine Health Assessment

Most clinical spine assessments rely on subjective patient impressions and questionnaires that include questions such as "rank your pain on a scale from 0-10". Unfortunately these measures are highly variable and are confounded by many factors not related to the disorder, which makes tracking patient recovery and therapy effectiveness difficult.

Over the past two decades, researchers at the Spine Research Institute have been using measurements of dynamic spine motion to understand patient impairment and recovery. Data collectected from a device called the Lumbar Motion Monitor (LMM) can quantify a patient's spine motion characteristics during a standardized clinical test. Measurements are then compared to large normative databases to determine a patient's degree of impairment, which can be used to determine disorder severity, monitor improvement, evaluate treatment success, and decide when it is safe to return to work. These clinical tests are currently being used at OSU's Comprehensive Spine Center to track disease progression for patients with low back pain. We believe data-driven solutions like this one are the key to unlocking the complex nature of one of the world's most significant healthcare challenges.